Leaving Fort Ord

September 15, 1991|By Patricia Stevens.

I watched them drive off and then I stood there for several minutes just staring into the darkness. At Fort Ord there were rarely any stars. The summer fog was thick and hung suspended in the air a few feet off the ground. I stood at the end of our driveway. We lived on a cul-de-sac in the middle of a fan of identical yellow stucco single- family homes, and I could barely see the house next door. I`d spent a year of my life there, though at the time it seemed much more than that, and I knew at that very moment, with the fog dampening the top of my head and cooling the skin on my arms, that I was about to embark on a journey that would change my life as much as Steven`s would be changed by Vietnam.

When I stepped back inside, the music blared in my ears, and Steven and Cal and Richard were drinking more brown bottles of beer and eating cheese puffs and Oreo cookies from the bag. ``John says she usually wants him to go on half the night,`` Steven said. They were all three laughing, especially Steven, who belly-laughed.

``She was turning us all into voyeurs,`` Cal said.

``She breathes sex all right,`` I said. I was standing inside the door, staring down at the men who were sitting on the floor.

Richard looked up at me and smiled. ``It`s unconscious,`` he said.

``Blame it on pheromones.``

``Pheromones?`` asked Cal.

Steven looked first to Richard and then to me. I shivered. ``It`s cold out there,`` I said. ``The fog.``

``Right,`` Steven said, still staring at me. Then he looked away, guzzled from his beer bottle, and got up to change the record.

I walked over to the turntable. I touched his forearm. ``I think I`ll leave you men alone and go to bed. Rachel never sleeps past 7:30.``

``You do that,`` he said.

I was sleeping soundly when he came to bed. I awoke when I felt the hairs on his chest graze my back. He was sidling up to me. I thought he wanted to make love, but then he shifted and turned his body away so that we were facing opposite sides of the room.

The night after our party, Steven came home from the beer and the whiskey and saw an invitation from the colonel`s wife on the kitchen table. Inside his head, he was already waging his own battle; he just didn`t know it. I knew it too well, since his eyes were covered by a watery glass and animal fear. ``But I always send her an RSVP,`` I said. ``It`s right there. See. Already stamped and ready to go.`` For a brief moment, I remembered that he once liked my independence, ``Your spunk`` he`d called it.

He tore open the envelope, took out my note, and began to read. The words slurred. ``I regret that I will be unable to attend. . . .`` He slapped the note on the table. It had been written with a black fountain pen in my very best script. He spit out his next words. ``You will never stand behind me,``

he said. ``You will never support me. I can never trust you.`` I knew then that he knew how weak I was, how I couldn`t handle it if he came back without limbs, without a crotch.

``What about you?`` I said. I`d been home pacing the floor, waiting for him to come home, wondering if he`d been with a 19-year-old, someone who looked just like Hallie, in the back seat of our VW station wagon. ``By the time you come home, Rachel`s already in bed for the night. You have no time for her anymore. Or me, for that matter. The one day when I really need you, you`re off saluting and marching and didn`t even have the balls to ask for time off to see the birth of your own baby.`` I couldn`t seem to let go of it. I brought it up every time we had a fight, and Rachel was more than four years old.

When I did it, it was usually a dare to him. And it bubbled his eyes more, and he took the sleeve of his green fatigues and swept the table clean of Troop Leader Martha`s note and my reply. The sugar flew around in the air while the antique blue and white china sugar bowl splintered into shards on the army`s linoleum. ``Don`t ever, Shelley,`` he said, ``don`t ever imply that I do not love my child.`` He was hissing and spitting like a cat, his eyes two yellow-green marbles.

Then abruptly he turned from me and searched through the kitchen window to the rusted swing set standing in the middle of the tiny square yard. It was covered in a shroud of army base light and fog thick as unbeaten egg whites. In the distance, firew orks, the practice rat-a-tats, boomed the rehearsal for a big kill. ``Steven,`` I said to the back of his green costume. ``You`ll be back. And we`ll put this behind us. You`re coming back, Steven. You have to know that before you leave here.``

He turned back around slowly. His voice was as soft as Rachel`s when he said, ``You know nothing of duty, of obligation.``